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Table of Contents
Useful Links
Crystal structure
- Atomic and molecular orbitals from the Sheffield site. Nice pictures and animations.
- You can view and rotate cubic lattices at this site.
- Band structures of elements a periodic table that shows band structures of all the elements in their solid forms.
- Applet that demonstrates the construction of the first few Brillouin zones of a 2-D square lattice. Also discusses the Fermi surface.
- Cambridge site → Brillouin zone construction for 2-D square & hexagonal lattice lattice.
- Pictures of different lattice types; rotatable.
- Wien 2k developer website.
- Bilbao crystal server. Find space groups and reciprocal lattices.
- Portland State U's Crystallographic database. Get cif files for free!
Semiconductors
- Nice compilation of semiconductor properties from the Ioffe Institute in Russia
Phonons
- Java applet with interactive features demonstrating acoustic and optic phonon modes of diatomic chain.
- Dispersion relations and animations of phonon modes in several different crystals. Also surface phonons.
Miscellaneous
- Webelements is a great periodic table with easy-to-access properties, electron configurations, group and period trends, etc.
- Lots of materials data at MatWeb
- Data base of Fermi surfacepictures
- Solid state simulations. Drude model is nice.
- MIT group photonic crystal research. Nice pictures.
- Principles of Semiconductors is a good web book by Bart Van Zeghbroeck of Univ. Colorado. Google his name and you'll find the link. The Wiki wouldn't let me link to it for reasons I don't understand (I get a “spam blocked” error when I try to enter the link.
- The Physics and Chemistry of Color: the 15 Causes of Color by Kurt Nassau (Wiley-Interscience, 2001) is a fascinating book that talks about why things are the colors they are. In the library, & you can browse bits of it on Amazon.com
- Investigating thin film interference with a digital camera, Atkins & Elliot, Am. J. Phys. 78, 1248 (2010) talks about what color a film should be based on its thickness and therefore how interference affects color.
Articles
- Roald Hoffmann, How chemistry and physics meet in the solid state, Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. Engl. 26 (1987) 846-878 Link via OSU Library
(a comprehensive look at the first part of this course from a chemist's perspective)
- Roald Hoffmann, A chemical and theoretical way to look at bonding on surfaces, Rev. Mod. Phys. 60 (1988) 601-628 Link via OSU Library
(beyond the scope of this course, but a nice extension of the above to surfaces)
Journals
Some links are through the OSU Library Proxy Server; others are direct. Try linking through the OSU Library if you can't read or download journal content.
- Annual Review of Condensed Matter Physics is a new addition to the “Annual Review” Series of journals (also Mat. Sci , Chemistry etc). A good place to find summaries of quickly-developing fields by very respected authors.
- Nature Materials is a monthly journal devoted to the latest-breaking news on new materials.
- Nanoletters is a monthly journal specifically addressing physics and chemistry, of nanomaterials and nanodevices.
- Physical Review Online. Phys. Rev. Lett. usually features articles on hot, new materials, but materials is by no means its focus. Phys. Rev. B is devoted to solid state physics.
Mathematica
Mathematica (by Wolfram) is one of several extremely useful software programs that is useful for simple visualization of functions, computer-aided algebra, and is also a vehicle for very sophisticated programming. I highly recommend you use it for classwork, for research and for fun. As an OSU student, you have access via OSU's virtual lab, called “Umbrella”. Here is a link to a page I wrote for my PH424 physics class describing how to get access, how to use Wolfram's fantastic documentation and tutorials, and I added a few simple templates.
Here are some Mathematica notebooks that I wrote relevant to PH575.
- visualization of spherical harmonics (?? wiki won't upload .nb and .txt files)